Perspectives Reflection Symposium: Technique Trumps Relevance

Technique Trumps Relevance: The Professionalization of Political Science and the Marginalization of Security Studies

Michael Desch explains the disconnect between the discipline’s self-image as balancing rigor with relevance with the reality of how political scientists actually conduct scholarship most of the time. To do so, he accounts for variation in social scientists’ willingness to engage in policy-relevant scholarship over time. His theory is that social science, at least as it has been practiced in the United States since the early twentieth century, has tried to balance two impulses: To be a rigorous science and a relevant social enterprise. The problem is that there are sometimes tensions between these two objectives. First, historically the most useful policy-relevant social science work in the area of national security affairs has been interdisciplinary in nature, and this cuts against the increasingly rigid disciplinary siloes in the modern academy. Second, as sociologist Thomas Gieryn puts it, there is “in science, an unyielding tension between basic and applied research, and between the empirical and theoretical aspects of inquiry.” During wartime, the tensions between these two impulses have been generally muted, especially among those disciplines of direct relevance to the war effort; in peacetime, they reemerge and there are a variety of powerful institutional incentives within academe to resolve them in favor of a narrow definition of rigor that excludes relevance. Desch’s objective is to document how these trends in political science are marginalizing the sub-field of security studies, which has historically sought both scholarly rigor and real-world relevance.